1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relates to a remotely accessible service to a universal plug and play (UPnP) home network. More specifically, the present invention relates to a UPnP apparatus and method for providing a UPnP network with a multiple remote access service by operating a multiple remote access server (RAS) device in a UPnP home network and controlling the multiple RAS device by using a UPnP control point (CP).
2. Description of the Related Art
According to the popularity of home networks, a conventional PC network-oriented environment increasingly extends to an environment including home appliances using various lower network techniques. Therefore, a universal plug and play (UPnP) technology has been proposed in order to network these home appliances in a unified manner by using an IP protocol. The UPnP device architecture version 1.0 enables home appliances to be peer-to-peer networked on the basis of a distributed and open networking structure instead of being under centralized control. The UPnP device architecture version 1.0 uses the distributed and open networking to discover a UPnP device via an IP multicast in the home network. However, an IP multicast service is not guaranteed to be normally provided within the range of the Internet, making it impossible to control the UPnP device via the Internet since such control of the UPnP device needs information obtained by discovering the UPnP device.
Therefore, when the UPnP device or a control point (CP) device is physically separated and far from the home network, UPnP remote access architecture has been proposed so as to allow the UPnP device or the CP device to operate normally as if both were physically in the same network. The UPnP remote access architecture defines a remote access server (RAS) device within the home network and a remote access client (RAC) device within a remote network.